How To Use Ultimate Rewards To Get 8 Free Nights At Hyatt

As I’ve talked about before, the Chase Hyatt Visa Card offers 2 free nights at any Hyatt owned property in the world.

Unlike normal Hotel Credit Cards like the Chase Marriott Visa or Starwood Preferred Guest AMEX, which offer a fixed amount of points for signing up, the Hyatt Visa Card comes with 2 free night certificates that have no limitations on where they can be used.

You can redeem your certificates for some of the most expensive Hyatt properties in the world like the Park Hyatt Tokyo or Park Hyatt Paris Vendome, or you can use your free nights at some of the cheaper Hyatt brands like the Hyatt Place properties. The choice is up to you.

Hotel Categorization

While I knew that Hyatt was an Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partner at 1:1 ratio, I had never really looked into the Hyatt Gold Passport program even though I do have free Platinum status : )

In my opinion, the number one factor that impacts how valuable a hotel loyalty program relates to how they categorize their properties.

Almost all hotel loyalty programs put their hotel properties into different categories depending on how expensive each property is. Simply put, the more expensive the hotel’s regular room rate, the higher the category, the more points it will cost you for a free night. Makes perfect sense.

Most of my past hotel experiences have been with Starwood, so for their categorization, it goes from Category 1 -7, with Category 7 being St. Regis type hotels which cost upwards of 30,000-35,000 SPG points a night.

The current SPG AMEX sign up bonus offers 25,000 SPG points for signing up, meaning that if you wanted to stay at the St. Regis, you would not have enough points for even 1 night since it is a Category 7 property : (

This differs greatly from the Hyatt offer which provides 2 free night certificates that can be used at any Hyatt, regardless of how many points it would normally cost or what category the property falls under.

When I took a look at Hyatt’s property categorization chart, I found it interesting that their most expensive hotels (Category 6) only cost 22,000 – 27,000 Gold Passport Points a night.

This includes the uber expensive properties I mentioned above like the Park Hyatt Tokyo & Park Hyatt Paris Vendome.

How To Get 8 Free Nights, Instead Of 4

You may be wondering why it matters that the highest Hyatt properties cost only 27,000 points a night, when the 2 free night certificates aren’t tied to points.

It all comes back to the fact that Hyatt is a Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partner.

From all the emails I’ve gotten asking for the Chase Sapphire Preferred screen shot, I suspect a lot of people have 50,000+ Ultimate Rewards points laying around.

I personally have 130,000+ Ultimate Reward points from signing up for both the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Chase INK Bold Cards.

In the past, as with all travel credit cards and promotions, I have advocated that if you are considering getting the Hyatt Card for the 2 free nights, that you should double down on the offer.

This means that you should get your travel partner (spouse, significant other, friend, lover, family member, etc) to also get whatever card you are signing up for because then you can double the amount of benefits you are getting.

In the case of the Hyatt Card, by each signing up, you will each get 2 free nights, for a grand total of 4 free nights.

Since most people travel, at a minimum, with another person, I think this concept of doubling down can be extremely advantageous.

With the ability to transfer from Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt at 1:1 ratio and the most expensive Hyatt properties only costing 27,000 Gold Passport Points a night, it is pretty easy to do the math and see what an opportunity this can be to get some additional free Hyatt night.

If you and your travel partner both signed up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred and got the 50,000 offer and completed the minimum spend requirement, by transferring your Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt, you should each have enough for 2 free nights at Hyatt, for a grand total of 4 free nights.

If you both have already, or are planning to, sign up for the Hyatt Visa, that is another 2 free nights for each of you. This brings you to a grand total of 8 FREE NIGHTS at any Hyatt property around the world.

To put in perspective how awesome an opportunity this is, I have selected a few of my favorite Hyatt Properties below along with their cost for a randomly selected day in December.

I obviously write about this kind of stuff everyday on the blog, but even I was amazed at some of these prices!

But What About The Flight?

If you are reading this and saying, okay I guess that makes sense, but why wouldn’t I just use the Ultimate Rewards for free flights.

That is a valid question and you are free to do that and in many cases, that might make more sense.

If you were so inclined, you and your travel partner could both sign up for the Hyatt card and be happy with 4 free nights total, and then use your previously earned Ultimate Rewards points to cover the cost of flights.

9/10 times that is probably what I would do because to be honest, I’m sure 8 nights at 1 property could be a little over kill. However, in the same token, you could easily split the 8 nights into 2 separate trips of 4 nights each. That is probably far more reasonable.

The only reason I bring up transferring Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt is because generally an Economy flight anywhere in the world at most will cost $1,500. So even if you had to spend out of pocket for the flight, the lodging at any 5 star Hyatt of your choice would be free.

After looking at all the amazing Hyatt properties around the world, I am seriously considering taking a 4 day pit stop at the Park Hyatt Maldives enroute to India. If anyone has been, please let me know what you thought of it!

As you can see, as long as you do some Long Range Planning for your next trip, there is absolutely no reason why your airfare & lodging at a 5 star hotel can’t be 100% free!

If you are thinking about a honeymoon, second honeymoon, anniversary, etc, this is definitely the way to go!

Comments

"Almost all hotel loyalty programs put their hotel properties into different categories depending on how luxuriousness each property is. Simply put, the nicer the hotel, the higher the category, the more points it will cost you for a free night. Makes perfect sense."

Most people think this is the way it works, and it generally does for online hotel booking services. However, when you're talking about the categories assigned by a hotel company to its own properties, the categories reflect how EXPENSIVE the hotel is compared to other hotels run by the same company. It is NOT a statement about the quality of a given hotel.

For example, Starwood has a lot of very nice properties in Thailand that are no where near the category they would be if they were in a place like New York. The official Starwood presence on FlyerTalk and Milepoint has explained this numerous times, yet people still regularly complain "How can such and such a hotel be in this high category when the place is dump?" It's about cost, not quality.

I would imagine that all large hotel chains, including Hyatt, use a similar classification method.

i dont have hyatt card but have hyatt account. just checked to see how many points at some hotels and it doesn't allow you to see unless you have hyatt points in hyatt account. it looks like if i have lots of chase UR points. i may not need to open another chase hyatt card and also i have too many new inquiries. if i transfer lots of UR points to hyatt account online and i have lots of hyatt points, do I get any diamond or gold hyatt status?